The Lady In Red

TimothyJinx · May 26, 2013

I took a few photos this afternoon and tried a few things. Not included here, but I tried a beauty dish with not much success. Will watch more videos and practice, practice, practice.

Here are a couple from the shoot. Curious as to your thoughts.

#1.

#2.

tirediron · May 26, 2013

Not bad! I'd like to see just a little more light though, on both subject and background.

sarah_19_nz · May 26, 2013

I really like them! especially the first image. I agree just a TAD more light on her face especially in the second pic. Great shots though

Granddad · May 26, 2013

I like these, Timothy, good poses and lovely expressions on her face. In the first one she's doing the same thing my wife does in this kind of pose, that is she's leaning backwards a fraction and you've also got her cropped too centrally (IMHO): she's facing towards the right so I believe she should have more dead space to the right than the left (according to what I've learned here and it seems to work). Here's my take on it:
I straightened her up, added more background so I could move her to the left and then dodged the background to make it white rather than grey. I also added a little more light to her face.

Number 2, I added more light to her face and chest in LR3.4 using the exposure brush, lightened the background and cropped to 1 x 1 because my first impression was that she had too much dead space above her. I then put her through Portrait Professional 11 to smooth the facial skin; I didn't like the results of that as it was too smooth so back in PSE 8 I cut her face out of the original, pasted it over the smoothed version and gave it an opacity of about 50% to restore her skin texture. Again I lightened the background.

1.

2.

Neither of my versions are perfect but you'll see what I mean.

Critique of my critique is welcome, I'm stepping out of my comfort zone by venturing into giving this and have my fingers firmly crossed that I'm not breaking all the rules of photography... especially when the OP regularly gives such excellent and well considered critiques and advice!

TimothyJinx · May 26, 2013

tirediron said:
Not bad! I'd like to see just a little more light though, on both subject and background.

Thanks. Interesting - I felt that way about #2 but not necessarily about #1. In your experience, how do you determine if your exposure is where it should be? I have my monitor calibrated now and so I just eye things up. Obviously in Camera Raw I can see if I am overexposed. And I know there is an element of taste and preference - but "underexposed" is one of the most consistent comments I get when I post. Help me out!

sarah_19_nz said:
I really like them! especially the first image. I agree just a TAD more light on her face especially in the second pic. Great shots though

Thanks Sarah!

TimothyJinx · May 26, 2013

Granddad said:
I like these, Timothy, good poses and lovely expressions on her face. In the first one she's doing the same thing my wife does in this kind of pose, that is she's leaning backwards a fraction and you've also got her cropped too centrally (IMHO): she's facing towards the right so I believe she should have more dead space to the right than the left (according to what I've learned here and it seems to work). Here's my take on it:
I straightened her up, added more background so I could move her to the left and then dodged the background to make it white rather than grey. I also added a little more light to her face.

Good edit. I agree with everything you did here. Thanks!

Granddad said:
Number 2, I added more light to her face and chest in LR3.4 using the exposure brush, lightened the background and cropped to 1 x 1 because my first impression was that she had too much dead space above her. I then put her through Portrait Professional 11 to smooth the facial skin; I didn't like the results of that as it was too smooth so back in PSE 8 I cut her face out of the original, pasted it over the smoothed version and gave it an opacity of about 50% to restore her skin texture. Again I lightened the background.

Another good edit. I had actually planned to crop and lighten this one. Your skin comments are interesting. I posted a b&w/pink photo of my daughter the other day and I did what I thought was a very moderate amount of skin smoothing. But everyone said I did too much. In reality I did very little. So I didn't do much to either of these. It's a tough balance and of course it's very subjective.

Granddad said:
Critique of my critique is welcome, I'm stepping out of my comfort zone by venturing into giving this and have my fingers firmly crossed that I'm not breaking all the rules of photography... especially when the OP regularly gives such excellent and well considered critiques and advice! ;-)

Well, thanks for the kind words! And if you break any rules of photography I won't know because I don't know very many of them!